Badge of shame

January 18th, 2011

The W3C have unveiled a logo for HTML5. I’m not sure the world needs such a logo, but I think it looks pretty good. It reminds me of some of the promotional materials used by the Web Standards Project back in the day—simple bold lines that work well at small sizes, with a whiff of Russian constructivism.

The logo is a general-purpose visual identity for a broad set of open web technologies, including HTML5, CSS, SVG, WOFF, and others.

What. A. Crock.

What we have here is a deliberate attempt to further blur the lines between separate technologies that have already become intertwingled in media reports.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t mind if marketers and journalists use HTML5 to mean everything under the sun, but I expect working web developers to be able to keep specs separate in their mind. If Apple or Google were pushing this kind of fuzziness, I wouldn’t mind …but this is coming straight from the horse’s mouth (or, in this case, straight from the horse’s ass).

“But,” cry the cheerleaders of ambiguity, “we need some kind of term to refer to HTML5 plus CSS3!”

Citation needed.

We never needed a term to refer to “XHTML 1.0 plus CSS2.1” or “HTML4.01 plus JavaScript” or “any combination of front-end technologies.” Why this sudden all-conquering need for a term that covers so many different technologies as to be completely meaningless? As I said before:

Clarifying what is and isn’t in HTML5 isn’t pedantry for pedantry’s sake. It’s about communication and clarity, the cornerstones of language.

But I guess I’ve lost that battle. Now even the W3C are intent on blurring the distinction between different technologies to the extent that using a particular font file format qualifies as HTML5.

So now what do I do when I want to give a description of a workshop, or a talk, or a book that’s actually about HTML5? If I just say “It’s about HTML5,” that will soon be as meaningful as saying “It’s about Web 2.0,” or “It’s about leveraging the synergies of disruptive transmedia paradigms.” The term HTML5 has, with the support of the W3C, been pushed into the linguistic sewer of buzzwordland. Instead, I will try using phrases:

“HTML5, no really”,

“The parts of HTML5 that are documented in the specification labelled HTML5”,